David Brooks, senior editor

HAS THERE ever been a bigger challenge to the American college admissions process than George Bush? Selecting the nation's future leaders, admissions committees at elite colleges insist that students have nearly flawless grades. Bush didn't. They require stratospheric SAT scores. Bush's were good but not great. The committees want to see intellectual curiosity and wide experience with different cultures. Bush has never demonstrated much of the former and never acquired much of the latter.

Yet over the past four months, Bush has demonstrated that he possesses excellent judgment, and some sort of mental faculty that college admissions committees not only don't reward, they don't even seem to be aware of.

Bush has made a series of shrewd decisions. He decided to frame the struggle as a war on terror, even though some, including Senator Tom Daschle, feared the use of the word "war" was too broad. He decided to go after the regimes that harbor terrorists, even though many thought getting involved in places like Afghanistan would lead to quagmire. He decided to hook up with the Northern Alliance, which many considered a ragtag bunch. He recognized by 9 P.M. on the evening of September 11 that this was an opportunity to reframe relations with Russia and China.

So how could a guy who appeared so lightweight be so smart? The conventional explanation is that the president has been able to do so well precisely because he is simple-minded. As Time magazine declared, "War has turned what many saw as Bush's liabilities--his distaste for

The explanation is implausible on its face. In most realms of human endeavor, it helps to intelligently grasp the complex forces at work, but somehow when confronted by a new type of warfare against a new sort of foe, it's a bonus to be simple-minded? Where is the logic in that?

Moreover, over the past few weeks we've learned a lot about Bush's decision-making in the days after September 11, mostly from a series by Dan Balz and Bob Woodward in the Washington Post. And the evidence refutes the "simple-mindedness is good" explanation.

At key moments, Bush chose the less simple option. For example, in the early days, there was an internal debate over whether to focus on al Qaeda, the direct authors of the provocation, or to go after the broad network of terror groups, as the CIA argued. Bush sided with the CIA. Some aides wanted to describe September 11 as an attack on "our way of life." But Bush thought that phrase too America-centric. So he added, and "all nations that love freedom."

Moreover, the striking feature of Bush's mind is its pacing. Bush is famous for stubbornly sticking to his ideas. If he endorses a tax plan in 1999, he's still going to push it, under very different circumstances in 2001. Yet when the evidence mounts that he should change his mental framework, he can do it quickly and sweepingly. Bush entered the White House a gimlet-eyed foreign policy realist, skeptical of nation-building. Now he is an ambitious idealist, vowing to spread democracy and human rights. He is neither intellectually erratic nor closed-minded.